Cover not available

In:Points of Convergence in Romance Linguistics: Papers selected from the 48th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 48), Toronto, 25-28 April 2018
Edited by Gabriela Alboiu and Ruth King
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 360] 2022
► pp. 207–222

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Chapter 12
Formality by distance in Spanish and Catalan

 | York University
 | University of Toronto
Published online: 10 March 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.360.12bem
Abstract
Unlike the pragmatic literature, a pronoun’s ability to distinguish levels of formality has received relatively little dedicated attention in the syntactic literature. One definition of formality from the politeness literature defines it as social distance (Brown & Levinson 1987). We take the idea that formality can be viewed as distance literally and argue that second-person pronouns can incorporate Harbour’s (2016) projection, χ, that encodes spatial semantics. Variation in second-person pronouns results from differences in each language’s specific pronominal resources and the social meanings they are assigned.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Second-person pronouns in Spanish and Catalan
  • 3.On person and number
  • 4.Spatial deixis, vicinities and pronouns
  • 5.The proposal
  • 6.Morphology
    • 6.1A sampling of formality in Spanish and Catalan
      • 6.1.1Standard Peninsular Spanish
      • 6.1.2Standard Latin American Spanish
      • 6.1.3Salvadoran Spanish
      • 6.1.4Catalan
      • 6.1.5Cuban Spanish
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (24)
References
Arregi, Karlos & Andrew Nevins. 2012. Morphotactics: Basque auxiliaries and the structure of spellout. Dordrecht: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bjorkman, Bronwyn, Elizabeth Cowper, Daniel Currie Hall & Andrew Peters. 2019. Person and deixis in Heiltsuk pronouns. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue Canadienne de Linguistique 64(4). 1–18. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bowden, John. 2001. Taba: Description of a South Halmahera language. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope & Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Butt, John & Carmen Benjamin. 2000. A new reference grammar of modern Spanish (3rd edn.). Chicago, IL: NTC Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cardinaletti, Anna & Michal Starke. 1999. The typology of structural deficiency. A case study of the three classes of pronouns. In Henk van Riemsdijk (ed.), Clitics in the languages of Europe, 145–233. Berlin: Mouton-De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clements, George N. 1985. The geometry of phonological features. In Colin J. Ewen & John M. Anderson (eds.), Phonology Yearbook 2. 25–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cowper, Elizabeth & Daniel Currie Hall. 2019. Scope variation in contrastive hierarchies of morphosyntactic features. In David W. Lightfoot & Jonathan Havenhill (eds.), Variable properties in language: Their nature and acquisition, 27–41. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Déchaine, Rose-Marie & Martina Wiltschko. 2002. Decomposing pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 33. 409–443. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dresher, B. Elan. 2009. The contrastive hierarchy in phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Giusti, Giuliana. 2006. Parallels in clausal and nominal periphery. In Mara Frascarelli (ed.), Phases of interpretation, 151–172. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halle, Morris. 1997. Distributed morphology: Impoverishment and fission. In Benjamin Bruening, Yoonjung Kang & Martha McGinnis (eds.), MIT Working Papers in Linguistics: PF: Papers at the Interface, 425–449. Cambridge, MA: MITWPL.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halle, Morris & Alec Marantz. 1993. Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection. In Ken Hale & Samuel Jay Keyser (eds.), The view from Building 20: Essays in linguistics in honour of Sylvain Bromberger, 111–176. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harbour, Daniel. 2011. Descriptive and explanatory markedness. Morphology 21. 223–245. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. Paucity, abundance, and the theory of number. Language 90. 185–229. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. Impossible persons. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi. 2008. When is a syncretism more than a syncretism? Impoverishment, metasyncretism, and underspecification. In David Adger, Susana Béjar & Daniel Harbour (eds.), Phi Theory: Phi-features across modules and interfaces, 251–294. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi & Rolf Noyer. 1999. Distributed morphology. Glot International 4. 3–9.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi & Elizabeth Ritter. 2002. Person and number in pronouns: A feature geometric analysis. Language 78. 482–526. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lipski, John M. 2007. El español de America [American Spanish]. Madrid: Catedra.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Noyer, Rolf. 1992. Features, positions and affixes in autonomous morphological structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.
Sells, Peter. 1987. Aspects of logophoricity. Linguistic Inquiry 18. 445–479.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wheeler, Max, Nicolau Dols, & Alan Yates. 1999. Catalan: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue